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Jun 1, 2018, 06:00am

When It's Time To Consider Chatbots As Part Of Your Customer Experience Strategy

Greg is SVP of Digital at Yes&, a performance-based marketing agency in Washington DC.

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Chatbots are increasingly being used by companies to engage with their customers. In fact, it has been reported that 8 in 10 companies have already adopted them or are planning to do so by 2020. This points to fast growth in the market. In fact, 15% of consumers have interacted with a chatbot in the last 12 months, and this number will undoubtedly grow at a quick pace over the coming months.

There is still ground to cover, however, in helping customers become more comfortable with using artificial intelligence for customer support. According to a study by PointSource (registration required), 54% of survey respondents would still prefer to talk to a real person, with one primary cause for concern being that they feel the artificial intelligence won't understand or might make a mistake.

Chatbots have come a long way, however, and an example of one used to great success is Dom from Domino’s Pizza. Introduced in 2016 by the international restaurant chain, Dom allows customers to order their favorite pizza via twelve different methods, including Facebook Messenger, text and Google Home.

Domino’s has been successful for several reasons. First, they’ve made Dom accessible virtually anywhere, from any device. Second, they imbued him with personality. Try chatting with him and he may crack a cheesy (pun intended) joke. Finally, it’s unbelievably easy to use, with the ability to order your favorite pizza via simply texting a pizza emoji.

More and more companies are beginning to use chatbots to assist their customers in user-friendly ways. But is your brand ready to utilize a chatbot? Based on my experience, there are several reasons to explore using artificial intelligence and chatbots in your customer service efforts.

Reason 1: You need to offer 24/7 support.

A common reason a company makes the decision to start utilizing chatbots is to offer off-hours support in situations where customers have questions around the clock. Staffing customer service or technical support in these situations can be quite costly, particularly for smaller companies.

One of the tangential benefits of doing this is that it allows brands to ease into chatbot adoption during certain hours of the day. You may soon find that your chatbot saves your team a lot of time and effort and choose to start using it 24 hours a day.

Remember, however, that you will need to put in place a robust support system for your chatbots if you choose to adopt them as a full replacement for your current customer service team.

Reason 2: Your customers have a lot of common questions.

Any company that has frequent customer support needs can have a lot of people who are essentially asking the same thing, albeit in their own words. This is a big drain on your customer service team when a chatbot can interact and answer these queries quickly and easily.

This is also a major step up from the classic frequently-asked questions (FAQs) section of a website, or even a technical support forum, because it’s interactive in real time, personalized, and it doesn’t ask the user to search through a myriad of lists and answers to other irrelevant questions.

What’s better, your chatbot can “learn” over time and become more helpful as new questions are asked. There are several benefits to this, such as easily having metrics about the types and volume of specific questions over time and ensuring standardized ways of answering and solving consumers’ problems.

Reason 3: It is difficult for your customers to navigate to the correct place to take specific actions.

The answers to common questions can often take a consumer from an informational website to an e-commerce page to place or check on an order, or to other locations or systems. The larger the organization, the more systems and integrations might be required to assist your customers.

With a little guidance and setup from your team, your chatbot can easily guide a consumer to the right place to take an action, such as paying a bill, checking on the status of an order, answering a technical support question or any other queries. They can also be helpful when user accounts are required to access systems and your customers have problems with their customer logins, passwords or other data.

These things might take a customer service representative a lot of time and specific knowledge to solve, but artificial intelligence can access multiple systems quickly and securely and help customers in near real time.

While there are several great reasons to use chatbots, there are also factors to consider before adoption. In order to successfully adopt chatbots, you need to be able to guide them quickly and easily to the correct place to find information. If you don't have a consistent method of organizing and updating the information for a chatbot to access, you may run into issues getting consistent results. As great as artificial intelligence can be at learning where to find relevant information, you need to give it an organized structure within which to work and grow.

The adoption of chatbots as part of your customer experience strategy can be beneficial to your business; however, if you have doubts, do some research and see how your customers respond to a limited test. With many frameworks and applications already in place, it is surprisingly easy to create your own.

Remember that you can start small with limited adoption on certain channels or by using the technology to solve specific challenges your customers may face. From my perspective, we are really just starting to see the beginning of chatbot adoption, so it is a good time to start exploring.

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